We are trying to persuade our local parish council that we should have a Neighborhood Plan.

The issue we have is that housing is being allocated in our small town when the local city has brownfield sites in its boundaries and nearby. Surely the government should pay to clean up those sites so that its just as profitable for developers to build there and so reduce green house gas emissions from commuting.

Also I am trying to get a Community Development Co-Op going in order to create sustainable Community Interest Companies. One idea is for a Community Garden producing vegetable boxes. If we were to sustainably feed the current community we would need around 256 aces of arable land. Allotment gardens are 11 times more productive than factory farming and provide more sustainable local jobs. Can we use the Neighborhood Plan to reserve this amount of land. Or does allocated housing come first?

Hi
My name is Craig and I help coordinate a volunteer group here in Sunderland they are called the Hope Volunteers. The Hope Volunteers ( hope stands for helping other projects evolve) consists of Homeless men and women living here in the centre volunteering their time in a variety of projects, from Gardening, making and serving soup and sandwiches in two areas of the city, litter picking, DIY and anything that the general public ask for, we have even helped in removals, taking things out of lofts to name a couple.

We are a group who want to take over a local theatre, owned by our District Council. We served an Intention on the Council but they have gone ahead and sold the theatre to a company (formed 24 Feb with one director) and now tell us that this theatre is not a public asset.

To recruit we have a pretty much captured market and ask any current residents if they want to volunteer, you might say well that’s easy for you, but it’s not, we still have problems getting our residents to volunteer consistently. We can’t have members of the public volunteer due to risk assessments and security checks.

The differnce it makes is that we find guys and girls suddenly find they have skills and talents they did not know they had, of course it’s making a differnce in the community as well with the work we do but more importantly in the volunteers themselves

We are a group who want to take over a local theatre, owned by our District Council. We served an Intention on the Council but they have gone ahead and sold the theatre to a company (formed 24 Feb with one director) and now tell us that this theatre is not a public asset.
How can that be the case?

Thanks Trevor. I;m not an expert in this area, so I’ll see if there is anyone available to come on and give you some advice.

Is there anyone in the forum at the moment who has any experience of something similar and can offer some advice?

The challenges we face in recruiting is it is very much a what’s in it for me culture, so we have to offer incentives, such as food, cinema tickets which we have negotiated cheap from the cinema, toiletry packs, gym passes etc etc.
Retaining is pretty much the same with the same residents volunteering time after time.